Marcella Campagnano uses the image as an instrument of reflection on the condition of women. In the 1970s she formulated a hypothesis about female identity and created with her friends, traveling companions in the women's movement, several series of black and white photographic images, some of which were collected in this volume published in 1976.
In 1974, with the help of some friends from her self-awareness group and the Feminist Collective of Via Cherubini, she stages the different roles imposed by the social community on the female figure, transforming the living room of her home into a temporary, improvised photographic set. Hanging a piece of gray carpet on a wall, the camera fixed on the tripod, only two lamps aimed at the ceiling to obtain diffused light, a mirror to check one's own image before the shot, records a light-hearted and ironic game of disguises that is a act of awareness and reflection on the unlikely female identity.
The series "The Invention of the Feminine: ROLES" was born, one of the most acute intuitions and the most significant works on identity and its representation in the artistic research of the 70s and in the art of the Feminist Avant-garde.
Subsequently Marcella Campagnano resumes working on "The Invention of the Feminine" with the GIFT cycle in which the friends portrayed wear clothes made by the artist with poor or recycled materials, which allude to distant royal figures. The game of representations thus takes the form of a free homage to the great protagonists of the history of painting and, going beyond the stereotypical childhood dream of the princess, becomes a powerful affirmation of the original "royalty" of women who, as Marcella Campagnano writes, "sinks roots in the myths of the Mother Goddesses and which is, by tradition, of divine origin ”.